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all the vacant posts with ticket-punchers who know how to work ‘the system,’ okay? I want people with ideas in here, not politicians with agendas.”
Winston set his cup down, managing not to rattle the saucer as he did so. He was a little surprised that his hand wasn’t shaking. The length and breadth of what Ryan proposed was quite a bit more than the job which he’d had every intention of declining. It would mean more than was obvious. He’d have to cut himself off from his friends–well, not really, but it meant that he would not make executive decisions based on what campaign contributions the Street would give the President as a result of the nice things that Treasury did for the trading houses up there. That’s the way the game had always been played, and though he’d never been a player, he’d talked often enough with those who were, working the system in the same old way, because that was how things were.
“Shit,” he whispered half to himself. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
As founder of the Columbus Group, he’d assumed a duty so basic that few ever thought about it, beyond those who actually undertook it–and not always enough of them. Literally millions of people, directly or indirectly, entrusted their money to him, and that gave him the theoretical ability to be a thief on the cosmic scale. But you couldn’t do that. For one thing, it was illegal, and you ran the risk of rather substandard federal housing as a result of it, with very substandard neighbors to boot. But that wasn’t the reason you didn’t. The reason was that those were people out there, and they trusted you to be honest and smart, and so you treated their money the same as you treated your own, or maybe even a little better, because they couldn’t gamble the way a rich man did. Every so often you’d get a nice letter from some widow, and that was nice, but it really came from inside. Either you were a man of honor or you were not, and honor, some movie writer had once said, was a man’s gift to himself. Not a bad aphorism, Winston told himself. It was also profitable, of course. You did the job in the right way, and chances were that people would reward you for it, but the real satisfaction was playing the game well. The money
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was merely a result of something more important, because money was transitory, but honor wasn’t.
“Tax policy?” Winston asked.
“We need Congress put back together first, remember?” Ryan pointed out. “But, yes.”
Winston took a deep breath. “That’s a very big job, Ryan.”
“You’re telling me that?” the President demanded . . . then grinned.
“It won’t make me any friends.”
“You also become head of the Secret Service. They’ll protect you, won’t they, Andrea?”
Agent Price was not used to being pulled into these conversations, but she feared she’d have to get used to it. “Uh, yes, Mr. President.”
“Things are just so damned inefficient,” Winston observed.
“So fix it,” Ryan told him.
“It might be bloody.”
“Buy a mop. I want your department cleaned up, streamlined, and run like you want it to make a profit someday. How you do that is your problem. For Defense, I want the same thing. The biggest problem over there is administrative. I need somebody who can run a business and make a profit to cull the bureaucracy out. That’s the biggest problem of all, for all the agencies.”
“You know Tony Bretano?”
“The TRW guy? He used to run their satellite division. .. .” Ryan remembered his name as a former candidate for a senior Pentagon post, which offer he’d turned down flat. A lot of good people declined such offers. That was the paradigm he had to break.
“Lockheed-Martin is going to steal him away in a couple weeks, at least that’s what my sources tell me. That’s why Lockheed’s stock is nudging up. We have a buy-advisory on it. He gave TRW a fifty-percent profit increase in two years, not bad for an engineer who isn’t supposed to know beans about management. I play golf with him sometimes. You should hear him scream about doing business with the government.”
“Tell him I want to see him.”
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“Lockheed’s board is giving him a free hand to–”
“That’s the idea, George.”
“What about my job, I mean, what you want me to do. The rule is–”
“I know. You’ll be acting Secretary until we get things put back together.”
Winston nodded. “Okay. I need to bring a few people down with me.”
“I’m not going to tell you how to do it. I’m not even going to tell you all the things you have to do. I just want it to get done, George. You just have to tell me ahead of time. I don’t want to read about it in the papers first.”
“When would I start?”
“The office is empty right now,” Ryan told him.
A final hedge: “I have to talk to my family about it.”
“You know, George, these government offices have phones and everything.” Jack paused. “Look, I know what you are. I know what you do. I might have turned out the same way, but I just never found it … satisfactory, I guess, just to make money. Getting start-ups off the ground, that was something different. Okay, managing money is important work. I didn’t like it myself, but I never wanted to be a doctor, either. Fine, different strokes and all that. But I know you’ve sat around a lot of tables with beer and pretzels talking about how screwed up this town is. Here’s your chance. It will never come again, George. Nobody will ever have an opportunity to be Sec-Treas without political considerations. Never. You can’t turn it down, because you’d never forgive yourself if you did.”
Winston wondered how one could be so adroitly cornered in a room with curved walls. “You’re learning the political stuff, Jack.”
“Andrea, you have a new boss,” the President told his principal agent.
For her part, Special Agent Price decided that Gallic Weston might be wrong after all.
THENOT1CETHAT there would be a presidential address tonight upset a carefully considered timetable, but only by
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a day. More of concern was the coordination of that event with another. Timing was everything in politics, as much as in any other field, and they’d spent a week working on this. It wasn’t the usual illusion of experts moving with practiced skill. There had never been practice in this particular exercise. It was all guesses, but they’d all made guesses before, and mostly good ones, else Edward J. Kealty would never have risen as far as he had, but like compulsive gamblers, they never really trusted the table or the other players, and every decision carried with it a lot of ifs.
They even wondered about right and wrong on this one–not the “right and wrong” of a political decision, the considered calculation of who would be pleased and who offended by a sudden stand on the principle du jour, but whether or not the action they were contemplating was objectively correct–honest, moral!–and that was a rare moment for the seasoned political operatives. It helped that they’d been lied to, of course. They knew they’d been told lies. They knew he knew that they knew that he’d lied to them, but that was an understood part of the exercise. To have done otherwise would have violated the rules of the game. They had to be protected so long as they did not break faith with their principal, and being protected from adverse knowledge was part of that covenant.
“So you never really resigned, Ed?” his chief of staff asked. He wanted the lie to be clear, so that he could tell everyone that it was the Lord’s truth, to the best of his knowledge.
“I still have the letter,” the former Senator and former Vice President, and that was the rub, replied, tapping his jacket pocket. “Brett and I talked things over and we decided that the wording of the letter had to be just so, and what I had with me wasn’t quite right. I was going to come back the next day with a new one, dated properly, of course, and it would have been handled quietly–but who would have thought. . . ?”
“You could just, well, forget about it.” This part of the dance had to be stepped out in accordance with the music.
“I wish I could,” Kealty said after a moment’s sincere pause, followed by a concerned, passionate voice. This
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was good practice for him, too. “But, dear God, the shape the country’s in. Ryan’s not a bad guy, known him for years. He doesn’t know crap about running a government, though.”
“There’s no law on this, Ed. None. No constitutional guidance at all, and even if there were, no Supreme Court to rule on it.” This came from Realty’s chief legal adviser, formerly his senior legislative aide. “It’s strictly political. It won’t look good,” he had to say next. “It won’t look–“